Saturday, January 05, 2013

White murder rates by state

++Addition++Hail looks at white homicide rates 45 years prior and compares them to the contemporary figures in a post that should be read in full. To his discussion of "Hispanic inflation", I'll note that 'whites' in the now heavily Hispanic states of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and California were more murderous in 1960 than they are today, though Texas has become a bit less violent, as Steve explains in the comments of Hail's post.

The Uniform Crime Reporting Data Series provides detailed homicide data by state with accessible reports from 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2003. Steve wants a decade of data to account for year-to-year randomness in small states. For now, we'll have to settle for half of that.

There are a few technical issues to address before diving in. Most importantly, murder rates among the total population are a lot easier to determine definitively than murder rates by subgroups within a population are. Murder is unlikely to go unreported--a corpse usually provides pretty good evidence of a homicide if it occurred. Take the number of murders by the overall population over a year and, voila, we have the homicide rate. However, the perpetrator(s) is sometimes unknown. Consequently, the sum rates of any number of non-overlapping subgroups is always going to fall short of the rate for the total population, even if the entire population falls into one of the various non-overlapping subgroups being considered.

To address this, for each state I figured the percentage of homicides perpetrated by whites among those homicides for which the race of the killer was known and then assigned this percentage of the unknown perpetrator number to the white total. This assumes that the racial breakdown of unidentified murderers mirrors that of their identified brethren. Shows like CSI would have us believe that lots of the hard-to-catch killers are white. On the other hand, structural racism suggests that society often turns a blind eye to blacks killing blacks in the ghetto. Who knows? My guess is that this method overstates the true white rate but that the effect is overstated pretty uniformly across states.

Another issue is ethnicity, specifically with regards to the question of Hispanic origin. The data are broken down into five categories: White, Black, Asian or Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaskan Native, and Unknown. Hispanics may be of any race, meaning most of them are included in the white numbers. This becomes obvious in the visualization subsequently linked to, as the states along the Southwest border are conspicuously more murderous than the rest of the country is (excepting, perhaps, Florida, which apparently does not participate in the UCR).

Because 2006 is conveniently both the mean and median year employed, the white homicide rate per 100,000 people is calculated by averaging the number of murders in each state over the included five years and comparing it to a state's total white population (including most Hispanics) in 2006.

Only non-negligent homicides, which constitute the vast majority of all murders, are included.

Finally, data are available from all states for each of the five years under consideration with the exception of DC (2009 data only) and the aforementioned Florida no-show. Estimated white murder rates during the aughts per 100,000 whites by state:

In addition to the white Hispanic/non-white Hispanic factor, proximity to the Canadian border appears to be associated with pacifistic tendencies. The upper Midwest does best (Nazis these Nordics and Teutons are not!), followed by the Northeast.

DC's whites are conventionally thought to be a cut above the rest of the country. They're the elites, after all. Even the white kids with parents who don't get them into private schools are as sharp as tacks. As Steve sardonically asks:

Has anybody checked out what Ezra Klein, Chris Matthews, and Cokie Roberts are up to?

As noted previously, data on DC are only available for 2009, a year in which there were 12 identified white killers and another 87 who went unidentified. That's a small sample size to work with. Fewer than one-in-five DC whites are Hispanic, so that offers little in the way of explanation, either. While it is a completely urban 'state' and the jokes about the district of corruption practically write themselves, I suspect something else is up with the data from the capital.

"The upper Midwest does best (Nazis these Nordics and Teutons are not!), followed by the Northeast."

Best to use "Viking-Berserker caricatures" in place of "Nazis":

(1) Whatever the crimes of the Germans under National-Socialism, a skyrocketing domestic murder rate in which Germans killed Germans in armed-robberies and so on was certainly not one

(2) One cannot use the term "Vikings" (except in the narrow sense of 'Norse warrior/adventurer'): The Norse of the post-Roman and pre-Christian era were disciplined and law-abiding in their own societies, giving rights to women, codes of laws, writing, and so on -- even creating proto-democracies, as in Iceland. The Norse, too, though, had warrior-core that did engage in foreign aggression, of course. Even they did not go around murdering other Vikings-warriors too much -- that idea, of the maniacal bloodthirsty-savage Viking who could never restrain himself, was always a myth.

Potentially useful for comparison and as a workaround for the aggravating "Hispanic-inflation" problem. I also included your calculated 2000s figures. The DC figure for 1960 was merely 4.1. Either Washington-DC Whites have gotten much more violent and prone to murder since then, or something is screwy with that data which yields a 12.4.

One admittedly minor point that pops out from the list is that the haoles in Hawaii are unusually murder-prone. Most of the states which rank higher have substantial Hispanic populations that lead to an inflated "white" murder rate. This may fit into the general theme that Hawaiian whites tend to be underachievers.

Maryland's another anomaly. Its Hispanic population isn't really large enough to inflate the white murder rate, and it's my impression that the Old Line State's white population is reasonably prosperous and educated. Yet they have a higher murder rate than much more redneck-y states like Arkansas or West Virginia. Perhaps a data flaw, like in nearby DC?

No, Hawaii whites are often enlisted military, or former enlisted military and their dependents, with all that that entails. Ironically southern whites tend to do best in Hawaii. They don't get homesick for winter, and despite the lack of hunting, there's no shortage of other outdoors sports to do here. Moreover they tend to "get" unspoken race realism and cheek to jowl living and handle it a lot better than many SWPL transplants who don't have the money to insulate themselves to white/banana (that's white acting Asian) circles.

The last time this was discussed, it was noted that homicide rates fall as trauma treatments improve. So, if the rates of attempted murder today were exactly the same as in 1960, we should expect to see the murder rates half as high as they were in 1960. Simply put, a victim is just less likely to die from his injuries than back then. If he survives, it isn't a murder.

The last time this was discussed, it was noted that homicide rates fall as trauma treatments improve. So, if the rates of attempted murder today were exactly the same as in 1960, we should expect to see the murder rates half as high as they were in 1960. Simply put, a victim is just less likely to die from his injuries than back then. If he survives, it isn't a murder.

Well perhaps, but as I pointed out at Hail to You the increased deadliness of handguns may have cancelled out any improvements in medical care. Instead of the six-shooter revolvers that prevailed in 1960 most of today's popular handguns are auto pistols holding 15 or more rounds. It's reasonable to assume that more rounds per gun = more victims shot multiple times. In addition, the pistol round that's all the rage today is the .40 S&W, introduced in the early 1990's. It's deadlier than the .30 Specials and 9mm's that people carried in 1960.

Another added wrinkle to the case of the low Caucasian IQ for Hawaii is the fact that much of the nominal haole population is Portuguese of Madeiran and Azorean stock (i.e. the Sicilians of Portugal). Back in the 1930s when they last broke it down in the census, about 1/3 of Hawaii's Caucasians were Portuguese or Spanish. While culturally, they weren't considered haole, for statistical purposes they were and are. It's more an artifact of the past. Portuguese heavily intermarried with the Hawaiian, Filipino and Puerto Rican populations here.

I have a hard time blaming the Portuguese for Hawaii's low white IQ scores and high crime rate. The city where I grew up in Connecticut had a big Portuguese population, including many Azoreans. Most of the immigration had taken place in the late 1940's through the early 1960's, so the kids my age were mostly US-born children of immigrant parents.

Socially and economically the Portuguese were largely indistinguishable from the general white population. About the only difference is that the immigrants themselves were mainly blue- rather than white-collar, though this was a difference of degree as it mainly was a Joe Sixpack sort of town, and in any event many of of the Portuguese immigrant men were in the construction field and did very well for themselves.

At most, the Portuguese were considered a slightly exotic form of white people, similar to two other big groups in town, the Lebanese Christians and the Albanian Muslims. I'll also point out that there were a lot of Puerto Ricans, and the Portuguese were far ahead of them in socioeconomic terms.

1) I agree with the comments about the possible effect of long-term military bases. Warrior types with nothing dangerous to do get self-destructive and create underclass style family problems for themselves.

2) The racial diversity angle is also possible if the other races making up the diversity are more likely to carry weapons than the natural white average. I always used to carry a knife when i lived in a majority black area but didn't when i lived in majority white or asian areas.

3) Number of paramedics per head is definitely a factor if you compare now with the time when there were just ambulance drivers whose job was solely to get people to a doctor quickly.

On the other hand the point made above about changes in weaponry and ammunition may be a countervailing factor in that.

I believe the Portuguese who moved to Hawaii tended to be recruited to cut sugar cane, which is about the worst job in the world, so they probably came from classes who didn't have a lot of better options. Perhaps New England Portuguese came from craftsman classes?

As much as it pains me to admit it, my racial paternal forefathers were not known for their mental prowess. Granted, what do you expect when you're the middle managers between Chinese and Japanese workers and Northern European managers? In short, they were stuck in the sandwich of people smarter than them, and most of them became proud of being offensively obtuse bozos (Frank DeLima has made a career here out of it, doing racial humor that went out of style in the mainland decades ago). Also, the socioeconomic thing was quite different in the past. On the social level Hawaiians were right below haoles, above the rest of the Asians. Economically, they were at the bottom. As for the Portuguese blending into the white population, from 1900 until the military buildup in the 1930s, they were the plurality of "Caucasians", if not considered haole proper. They didn't and for the most part still don't "act white". They're their own social group here, if mostly admixed at this point. My Dad's generation is really the last one with pure Portuguese.

http://home.online.no/~tor-ma/jokes/portuguee.htm

http://www.hawaiithreads.com/archive/index.php/t-6640.html

Steve:Not really to cut cane, though knowledge of sugar cultivation was one of the reasons they were hired. They were the field hands directly overseeing the Asian laborers. A little bit higher up the chain were plantation lunas (operational bosses) who were often Germans or Scots (this included my maternal great-great grandfather, who sparked one of the largest territorial era plantation strikes by beating a Japanese worker senseless). At the top were American and sometimes English/Scottish plantation managers. There were glass ceilings. An Asian could hope to become an overseer, but never a luna, a Portuguese could become a luna, but never a manager, etc. Also craftsmen did make up part of the Portuguese immigration to Hawaii (my guesstimate is about 10-20%, weighted more to later immigrants). My paternal great-grandfather came as a mason.

The Justice Department did a study in 2006 that separated the Hispanic whites from non-Hispanic Whites. When you use those figures, you come up with a total U.S. Non-Hispanic White murder rate of 1.5/100,000.

"Parenthetically, when compared to the rest of the developed world, the US does notoriously bad on measures of criminality (among other things). Race, of course, is a major reason why this is the case. Taken as nations of their own, the upper Midwest and the Northeast look just fine when measured against Europe."

I'd concur with what JayMan said. I've discussed with him about these issues of ethnicity in hbd chick's blog.

The most violent area in the entire country is the rural South which is majority white. Even the big cities in all areas of the country have lower rates of violence than the rural South. Blacks and Hispanics are very few in this area. Most of this rural South violence is white on white.

The only clear explanation is the ethnicities of the population. It is mostly a combination of Scots-Irish, Scottish and Irish. All very clannish ethnicities. If you know hbd chick's blog, you know how clannish groups like these tend to be violent anywhere you find them in any concentration.

I've lived in many states including in the Deep South, but I've spent most of my life in the Midwest and most specifically in Iowa. Iowa is very low on the murder rates and tends to be low on other social and economic problems.

The rural Midwest is an interesting comparison to the rural South. Both areas are majority white and both have high rates of gun ownership. What is odd about the rural South isn't just that people get killed, but how and by whom. Rural Southerners are more likely to be murdered by someone they know. Also, there are high rates of suicide and 'accidental' shootings.

A state like Iowa isn't even without some Scots-Irish ancestry, unlike the Upper Midwest where there is almost no Scots-Irish. However, the other ethnicities and the culture in general never allowed the clannishness of the Scots-Irish to prevail, despite their not insignificant numbers.

Look at this map:

http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/pics/geo200/pct_scots_irish.pdf

There are about as many Scots-Irish in Iowa as in Kentucky. What you also find in Iowa but not in Kentucky are the large number of Northern Europeans:

Urbanization probably has something to do with it. West Virginia is a really old state, so that should have an expected deflationary effect on homicide rates.

Speaking of age, Utah looks fantastic--our youngest state by far, very urban/suburban, and yet one of the lowest white homicide rates in the country.

Epigone,

Consider this. Maryland has many wealthy residents. On the other hand, many people don't know that Appalachia runs through western MD. And many people don't know that there are a sizable number of poor Whites in Baltimore.

As for Utah, well, the Mormon Church plays a large role in this. In addition, alot of Whites in Utah are of English and Scandinavian descent. This contrasts with many people of Scotch-Irish descent who went West.

I know I am late to the game here, but you can look at all of the DC homicide statistics on homicidewatch.org. They have catalogued the last 5 years, and there have been 5 white perpetrators of homicide out of somewhere between 400-500 homicides. Granted there are homicides that have not been solved, but very few in any of these would have been committed by white people. Also, in a one or two of the cases the white offender was with a black offender who actually pulled the trigger. Even counting these, the roughly ~250,000 whites in DC have committed roughly one homicide a year since 2010.

It seems to me that the "white" murder rate will be artificially inflated in any state where there's an urban ghetto with a high proportion of murders of black people that are unsolved. Instead of assuming that whites commit the same percent of these murders as they do of the state's solved murders, I think one should assume that whites commit the same percent of these murders as they do of the state's solved murders of black people, which is about 8%. And for (the smaller number of) unsolved murders of white people, we should expect that white people commit more like 86% of these murders.

For 2013 the FBI says that of the black victims nationally, 189 (8%) were killed by whites, and 2,245 were killed by blacks. For white people, 2,509 (86%) were killed by whites and 409 were killed by blacks. The key cities I would expect to be: DC, Baltimore, Detroit and Chicago, inflating especially the white percentages in DC, MD, MI, and IL, probably in that order.

The FBI nationwide stats may already calculate this my way. They have very few murders where they classify the race of the offender as "unknown" -- only 37 black people murdered by an "unknown" race assailant in 2013, but I think that Detroit alone has more unsolved black murders than that.

I decided to calculate the correlation between the white and black murder rates. I get .524 (Pearson's r). Thinking that perhaps the percentage of blacks in a state would be potential influential variable, I calculated the correlation of that with white and black murder rates, and get .466 and .391, respectively. the partial correlation between white and black murder rates with percentage black held constant is .42 (p = .0027).